Gaming

Had to drop off the Honda Fit for service near Southpoint. When I was done, I took a detour up to the SciFi Genre game store in Durham, my favorite local place to pick up boardgames and the like. I wandered around for a bit, when I came to the “Discount Shelf Area”. There, for the marked down price of one single dollar, was my favorite Japanese tabletop RPG: Doublecross (2nd edtition), in perfect condition. Even the “Scene Player” card and survey form was intact. I asked the employee when I bought it what the deal was, but while he was aware of it (“I was waiting to see who would pick that up!”), he had no idea how it got there.

Now it’s mine. That’s fate kicking me in the pants, saying “Finish up Tenra, then run a Doublecross campaign for your friends.”

Random Wednesday Thoughts:

* Moved all my investing/Scottrade cash over to OptionsFirst (“options.scottrade.com”), and have begun experimenting with various option platforms. Currently have a few contracts of CREE, Jan 2011 expiry, a call with a strike of 30. Next, from now until then, I plan to lease it out by making covered calls against it. We’ll see how that does. It’s definitely interesting to make the same amount of money with only a fraction of the overhead of owning the stock in full.

* PS3: Picked up Riddick: Dark Athena and God of War III. GoW is… well, not surprising at all. But the graphics are really, REALLY pretty, plus the reconceptualization of the Greek Gods is pretty cool.

* Currently reading “Gakuen Kakumei-den Mitsurugi” (“Mitsurugi: Tale of the School Revolution”). It’s probably my current favorite comedy manga (Saint Niisan in a close second place), I’m really enjoying the mini stories. If you read Japanese and dig surreal/human comedy (not so much slapstick, but watching twisted people make bad decisions over and over), I highly recommend this series. Plus, the art is gorgeous.

* So, aside from getting in shape, I’m also (stupidly enough) also getting better at making Parisian Macarons. I bought the “I Love Macarons” book from Amazon that I originally borrowed at the library, which started my descent into this party frenzy. I already have ideas of what to do for my next batch: Basically strong vanilla/vanilla-bean macaron shell, and buttercream in several flavors including Grand Mariner Orange, Vanilla, Matcha, and Ligonberry. While at the same time being careful not to eat too many, as I’m simultaneously dieting/exercising. This kinda feels like Greek Hell, but far more delicious.

Praxis: Back in the saddle on writing: Did two pages of translation last night, it felt plain good.

Gaming/Japanese Translation: Shinobigami: Wow, whatta game. I’m only about 20% understanding how it works based on the replays and rules text (for me it’s got a high time vs return rate than other recent books, still it’s not that long so its just a matter of time). I like how fights end the first time anyone takes damage. I also like the

Gaming: Owl Hoot Trail: The simplicity of the classes (hearkening back to Red Box Hack) and system, plus the anachronism of the setting, kept things really interesting. I loved diving into character without keeping track of Angst points and Innuendo Scenes.

Gaming: PS3: Just Cause 2 and Resonance of Fate are on their way from Amazon now. Not a lot of time to dedicate to either right now (they’ll mostly keep me busy during summer downtimes). But after playing the JC2 demo about 20 times, I figured it’s prudent to get the real deal.

Fitness: Wow. So not in shape, and not even due to all that gaming stuff above: Mostly poor meal choices at work and being sick/lethargic. Spring is now kicking my butt, though, so I’ve been doing more. Just need to do more MORE.

Stocks/Options/Other: So a bit ago I talked briefly about the option types I was playing around with: Namely diagonal spreads (avg goal: 10% gain/month) and riskier vertical spreads (avg goal: 20% gain/month, with spikes up to 35%). I forgot to mention that I fell in with the new wonky-trade branch of Scottrade, “Options First” (options.scottrade.com). What’s cool about this site is that like some other sites, you can create an account, put no “real” money in it (or associate it with any real money accounts), and simply practice your trades with “play money” for some time to become familiar with the system. I started last month with $10,000 in “play money”, and now have $11,500. %15 in one month, pretty nice! (this was from a one year/two month diagonal against APOL, and a two-month vertical against CREE) These are slightly riskier than owning stock and putting options against it, or making put/call orders when real stock is on the line, which basically means “I need to check my account for about 1-2 minutes every day or two”.

But otherwise, I’m liking what I see here. Unless the market totally crashes and we star buying up shotgun shells and dog food, I figure that I can maintain a zero-tau against my mortgage, house utilities and food with a starting pool of $20k… just need to get to that level first.

Orie: Kicking ass and taking names at CCCC. She’s near the top of her class at one of the hardest veterinary tech programs in the country, and she doesn’t even speak English as her first language. CCCC is a kind of mixed bag: They want to be taken seriously, but they try too hard. A lot of the professors just plain suck at teaching, handing out “busywork” as assignments. Still, Orie’s mauling the program like a wild animal.

Interesting story: So, while she’s kicking ass, she’s putting a lot of extra effort in due to the language issue. When she was in the registrar’s office, she mentioned to the admissions advisor something like that, like “Sometimes it’s really hard though: I bet I’m the first international student you’ve ever had here in your vet tech program.” The registrar/admissions advisor said, “Oh, no, not at all! We’ve actually had three international students go through the program, yessiree! Two of them were from England, and one was from Australia…”

Exercise: Haven’t been to the gym but once in the last week. Need to change that. When I go to the gym, I’m motivated to do more, make more gains, eat less bullshit, keep on the game. Got caught up in a cycle at work where I was tired, so I didn’t go to the gym, so I ate crap, and became tired, so I didn’t go to the gym… Going again tonight. Even a few minutes makes a huge difference.

BIG-XX this Fall: Looking forward to it. I didn’t go to my high school(s) reunions, college reunions, but damn I won’t miss my social group’s reunion. I hear the campus has changed a lot, will have to see that with my own head-orbs…

Spring is Here: I can tell because I have a sore throat and my nose won’t stop running.

Investing: The next game is getting an account at options.scottrade.com, and start applying what I’ve been learning about Diagonal and Vertical Spreads. Low-risk calls making 10-25% a month? (30% if I’m more aggressive, risky?) Yes, please. I turned $2500 into $10,000+ last year as a hobby/messing around, I wonder what I can do this year starting with that 10k… Only problem is that these take more research and control than regular options trades, so I have to be that much more careful.

Gaming: Been a slow month. Haven’t done actual role-playing games in a few weeks, as my main group has been between campaigns, playing Rock Band, boardgames and the like. Tomorrow we start up with Mouseguard, and will go from there…

Robot Unicorn Attack is far more fun that it should be at a glance. Very addictive. Also, Erasure. Woah.

*Thanks to Mark C, been a busy beaver. Well, an unbusy beaver with things I should be working on, but busy with leisure:

** Fatal Frame 4: CLEARED. This game is not coming out into English because Nintendo is stupid: They are forcing TECMO to implement some sort of changes or bugfixes that TECMO doesn’t have the money to do, and thus everyone loses. And yet, while the game was overall pretty ok (gameplay) to great (story), it could be that Nintendo is protecting western audiences from the MOST ANNOYING BOSS BATTLE IN YEARS.

** Oboro Muramasa: The Demon Blade: Cleared 3 of 6 endings, watched the other three on Youtube. Incredible game. If you’re learning Japanese, this game is basically Level 10 of your learning cycle. It is endless awesome of middle-ages spoken royal grammar, with both keigo and low speech cranked up to “11″, and tooooons of references to classic Buddhist references: Various Boddhisotvas (Acala/Fudoh-Myou-oh? Shinra-Bansho/The Universe? Sweet). It’s 3 kin of Japanese culture in a 380 monme bag.

** Fragile/Goodbye Ruins of the Moon: I mentioned before that this is like a Feelgood Anime Fallout 3. Gotta revise that: It is better described as “Sorrow and Loneliness: The Roleplaying Game”. If you like unique experiences in console games, you GOTTA check this game out. Admittedly, there’s some boring bits with long empty hallways, and the inventory system is a little shady at times in the length of menu switch times, etc. But overall: Holy crap, got choked up a few times.

Why? We don’t know what the incident is, the game doesn’t talk about it at all and is likely not to. But at some point most of humanity dies, billions and billions of people. And the thing is, they all knew it was coming and had time to prepare themselves. So you encounter these artifacts, toys and books and items and stuff, and when you pick them up you hear the story of their owners: Abstract pictures appear while the narrator tells a small story:

- A wedding ring. A father in law talks to his daughter in law, welcoming her into their family. Later, you find another item where it’s the father in law railing about the sorrow that his son and new daughter will never have a chance.

- A dog collar. The dog narrates, licking his master’s face as he cries.

- A school class picture, and a kid laments that he loves those school days, and is afraid of dying alone.

It’s a very similar overall theme to Fallout 3, but man the emotional punch this game packs is both brutal and exhilarating, far more than Fallout. It’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that the game looks and feels so anime sickly-sweet.

Anyway, I count it as a *must-play*. If you’re into light console RPGs. And gut-punching sorrow.

Ah, I forgot to mention: I beat FFXIII about three weeks ago. Some quick thoughts:

Boss Fight: It took about 7 tries or so the first time. The boss fight has three stages. The second stage is filled with cheap attacks that will murder you until you learn to spot them or equip items that will prevent them from happening.

Quick point of interest: Before the last boss, the max level you can achieve is “Crystanium Level 9″ aka “Role Level 4″. After the boss battle (and game end), it unlocks Level 10/Role 5, and puts you back at the save point right before the boss fight.

From there, you can wander off and explore all of the side-quests you missed or skipped, do all the power levelling needed to kill the giant adamantoises (sp? Basically a cross between a mammoth, turtle and Star Wars AT-AT Walker) and the like. Or, you can power up a lot then go fight the last boss again for an easier/more relaxed win.

So, some final thoughts and the verdict:

* The combat system I still believe is the most involved/intense combat system of any game in the series (that I’ve played, anyway). They added a completely new level of depth with the implementation of Time and Combo/Breaks.

* The graphics and cut scenes are exciting and brilliant, but that could simply be the product of having millions and millions of dollars to throw at an otherwise ok script. I was VERY disappointed in the fact that there’s no “FMV Viewer” (like in FFX: A “theater” where you can purchase/view the FMVs that you have seen already, so you don’t have to play through again or pre-save to show your buddies the cooler game scenes), this made Chapter 12 (“the chapter with all the FMV action craziness”)… not as special somehow.

* Summons: Great design. Unfortunately, shitty implementation: Each character has their own summons. When the game “opens” and lets you set your party, at that point you’ve already grown accustomed to playing one or two characters as your Leader. This means that you could go the entirety of the game and only see/use Lightning’s summons (well, not true; there’s an event where Snow’s is automatically activated as well). In fact, aside from seeing Hope’s and Snow’s because I specifically wanted to, I never once in my playthrough activated Sahz’s, Vanille’s or Fang’s summons. Compare this to XII where you could control the summons of other party members (and each party member had one), or to the awesome but overpowered summons Yuna had in FFX, where one character can activate one after the other.

Considering that I never found them all that particularly useful or powerful, I think summons are a total bust in FFXIII. Their design is cool, and I love the “ride mode”/”Transformers” aspect, but totally underutilized and marginalized. They wasted time implementing them to have them marginalized so.

* Story-wise, it’s good. However, I still think FFX wins the Epic Story award. No spoilers or anything, but in FFX they put your main character in the center of the love story and world drama. In FFXIII, there is an “already done” love story between two of the characters and a third character who is prominent in cut-scenes but isn’t an actual party member. Also, every character gets their own focus and in-depth storylines, at the expense of having one massive emo storyline focused on one character. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, but if folks who like FFX the most are wondering if FFXIII’s story has it beat: It doesn’t. Still better than 12, though.

* Does it deserve to bear the name “Final Fantasy”? I couldn’t care less, I was never interested in the fanboy fights. It’s fun, dramatic and exciting. The combat and story are both good. Only a little frustrating, and only boring (for me) in maybe two places (1= an overly long level with just Lightning and Hope; 2= the last level before the final boss fight, a total unrepentent grind-fest of length and repetition).

So I’m aiming to at one point run a medium-length Dungeons and Dragons 3/3.5e game set in a fantasical asian-themed setting using the excellent E6 hack (max character level = 6) by Ryan S. To that end, I picked up the Rokugan sourcebook for about $2 at some sale or other, and recently finally acquired the Oriental Adventures handbook for 3e as well.

I earlier ran a modified Legend of the Five Rings game, removing some aspects of the setting I didn’t like, and adding others in (namely religion, and names that don’t sound dumb). It worked ok, but since it was based on L5R’s d10-pool system, combat had no real tactical crunch: It all comes down to “roll some dice, look for “10s”; if you don’t have at least one 10, you fail (as all the PCs were “from the Crab clan”, they have these outrageous armor bonuses and the like).

So I thought about using D&D 4e: Soon in the PHB3 there will be Samurai and “Oriental” (yeah, I said it because I mean it) classes and rules hacks (“Ki!”) and the like. However, my experiences with 4e have been mixed between “better than OK” to “man, combat is *awesome*, but anything that isn’t combat feels contrived and silly”. I’m still gonna get Dark Sun when it’s released, and it’s idea of Kit-style “bolt-on/template classes” is exactly what I think a “Samurai” or “Ninja” needs to be. But honestly, core 4e supports orientalized-Japan pretty well: Tough warriors, samurai, mountain bushi are Fighters. Glamorous or skilled swordsmen are Rangers (with 2-weapon style, but simply have them fight with one katana simply making 2 attacks with it). Ninjas are Rogues. Taoist Sorcerers (Onmyoji) can be Wizards, Sorcerers or Warlocks depending on how you describe your character. And so on.

Anyway, since I’ve had a lot of luck running and playing 3e with the E6 hack, I figured I’d take a stab at buying the 3e Oriental Adventures/Rokugan material, and hacking it into something that I think could be some awesome Japanese-themed fantasy.

So I was reading through it last night, and man while I still think the core conceits of the Rokugan/L5R setting are pretty cool, there’s still a lot of just plain can’t-get-around-it *stinky* in there. I can’t work with this stuff. A lot of OA is recycled crap from 1st edition that didn’t work then.

Anyway, It started my mind chugging along, though. A hack. Oh yes, a hack. Possibly D&D 3.5e with some modifications, ruleswise. But more importantly, a setting hack: Something that feels a bit historic, a lot fantastic, builds off of core Japan/Chinese myth but evolves it as well.

The main inspirations for this direction were the anime 12 Kingdoms (classical Chinese monsters, basically giant normal animals, made scary; plus, all that culture); the Wii video game I’m playing now called Oboro Muramasa, which incidentally is awesome; and elements that rang true from my last L5R campaign. There’s definitely some Tenra Bansho Zero influence in there (it’s hard to distinguish anymore which parts of my inspiration were lifted from TBZ and which ones weren’t), but I was thinking something that was more fantastical, less extreme…

This is a project which I’ll engage in after TBZ is done from my end, but I’ve come up with a foundation and guidelines:

* Genuine setting material, complete with unique lands and people.

* No “non-human” characters, or at least very few (“spirit folk” would be about it).

* Rules for combat: 3e/4e/burning wheel-style tactics, not L5R style “stand toe to toe, roll a bunch of dice and get high numbers until the other guy falls over”

* Rules for social stuff: Unknown.

* Rules for CULTURE. This was a point of inspiration last night. GUMSHOE/Trail of Cthulhu style culture skills (instead of investigation skills); including things like Calligraphy, tea ceremony, painting, haiku/composition, music/instrument, yuujyou/makura-jutsu/”pillow arts”, buddhist/sutra lore, shinto lore, cooking, war history, craftsmanship, and so on. Every adventure would involve one or more of the above, and when the appropriate culture element came up, the person with that skill on their sheet (every member of the group would have at least one of these in a small amount) would step forward and strut their stuff, getting the clue, talking to the lord (“Oh, your tea ceremony style is unconventional! Please, show me again how you do that…”), and so on. While seeming to require its own system, this hack can easily be grafted into classic 3e/4e.

* Monsters: Monsters are cool and fun to hunt and defeat. Unfortunately, every attempt at western RPGs bringing in Japanese-themed monsters has failed IMO. Either they use stuff that doesn’t make sense (Rakshasa), or they use stuff straight out of the Japanese lore-book: Which might have been scary 300 years ago, but by our modern standards sounds lame or dumb (“a woman with a LONG NECK, OH SHIT!!!” “a WALL SEGMENT that is REALLY REALLY WET!!!” “An umbrella, but it’s one one eye and one leg and it hops around!!!” “A wooden wheel, on fire, with a mouth on it OMG!”). Every game I’ve seen, from D&D to Sengoku to L5R has basically taken these monsters, kept them as-is, and stapled hit points on them. I thought for a time that there was nothing to be done about this, but Awesome Video Games proved that wrong:

- Oboro Muramasa does the same, and on top of that it also creates a new type of monster that both pulls from classical mythology but layers modern sensibilities on top of it. THIS was the true visual inspiration that told me “This can be done: It is possible to create new monsters for a Japanese-themed fantasy game, keep them rooted in the classical mythology, but reinvent them so that they are scary and cool and not just archaic and lame-sounding.” For example:

Anyway, just some thoughts that were rolling around in my head. I’ll be digging deeper once TBZ is done. Likely this will turn into an open setting project compatible with any game, with stats for a few.

So, Mark C lent me his Wii for a bit, with a big pile o games to check out. Here’s some quick impressions of some games I’ve been playing with:

Fragile: Imagine this: Someone wants to make a Japanese version of Fallout 3 into a heartwarming anime-like experience. As weird as that sounds, that’s exactly what Fragile feels like. It’s creepy as hell, Tokyo is in shattered ruins, but you help ghosts find the afterlife in a heartwarming way (but the lead up to them screams “they died horribly, in terrible sadness and pain”). It’s very weird, and extremely cool thus far.

Zero (aka Fatal Frame) 4: OK, I’m hooked. Unfortunately, they couldn’t design a Wii interface for crap: It uses nothing at all “Wii-like”: The Motion Controller only registers “up and down”. So when you look around or use your camera, you have to use the nunchuk to steer left and right, and the motion controller to do up and down. They really should have just included a PS2 controller, because that’s all it is just split up over the Wii. Story so far is good, and sufficiently creepy.

Silent Hill – Shattered Memories: I like what they’re trying to do, but the run-away scenes involve too much waggling. I’ll probably pick it up on sale on the PS2 (where, to throw a dude off your back, you have to “press one button”).

Oboro Muramasa: Hot damn. HOT DAMN. Why didn’t they make this a cross-platform game? It doesn’t even use the Wii motion stuff at all… I totally would have paid $50 for this on the PS3. Bastards.

Imabikisou: Interesting use of the “audio novel” (basically a long-form choose-your-own-adventure kind of text game, with pictures and some fragments of animation): Lots of text, head kinda hurts. Makes me want to play 428 even more (will probably import for the PS3).

I’m a little over 20 hours in. I really like the story thus far. I got past the “WIRED Review Guy” ‘s progress when he posted his mini-review. I went to gamefaqs.com forums for some strategies on some particularly badass boss fights before backing away slowly from all the nerdrage and going to www.ff13.in instead.

Recent revelations/likes

* Experience: This is the big one. Fixes all my issues with earlier games like FFX, where if your member wasn’t in the party (or got knocked out before the battle ended) that character didn’t gain XP. Basically, this led to a situation where your weak characters stayed weak (Khimari!) while your strong core characters kept getting more powerful… eventually leading you to need to grind and grind the “other half” of your party at some point for balance.

I dunno why I didn’t notice it at first, but I finally caught it when I was able to choose my own battle members (about 15 hours in?): Basically, if the three dudes that I’ve been playing with for an hour get into a battle, 2 get knocked out at the end and only Lightning is left standing, and I’m awarded “1000 CP” (xp), then not only does every member of my party get those CP, but so do the people that aren’t in my party. This is awesome. Looks like they took note of how the game Valkyria Chronicles did levelling, and did it Right. This means I can kick as with my chosen dudes for 60 minutes, then later switch to other party members and have the fun of basically spending a mountain of amassed XP in any way I want.

* Grinding is entirely optional to beating the game. It helps, and you can do it if you want, but in the long scheme they crafted the experience so that if you just want to experience the story, you don’t have to spend 10 hours wandering up and down Mt. Gagazet killin’ doodz.

* I was about 16-17 hours into the game until I saw the classic “We will reuse the skins of earlier monsters, slightly changing their abilities and sending them back at you again” thing. There’s toooooons of monsters, including tons of “puddings” never seen before, including Rust Pudding, Guear Pudding (complete with siren-helmet), and on top of that some puddings will merge together into larger puddings.

* Attention to detail in plotting enemy battles. Because of the “killing tunnels” effect, your battles are pretty well laid out for you. But they don’t throw the same thing at you over and over: It might be 2 Robots. Then 1 Rust Pudding. Then 4 Rust Puddings. Then 2 Robots and 1 Rust Pudding. Then 3 Rust Puddings and 2 Robots. Each one of the encounters above requires a slightly different strategy to beat well: Using “Defenders”, arranging Attacker-Blaster combos, etc.

* The AI is pretty smart, but there are some dumb things (see below). Overall, I think the combat is the most tactical of any FF game to date. I know it’s not saying much in the light of reaaaaaally tactical J-RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei and the like, but still it kicks FF X and all the way back in the jimmy.

* The auto-attack button will plan out the best attacks for you… or does it? I’ve recently found myself inputting commands myself for better strategy: Using “Ruins” (think “magic missile) on enemies I want Lightning to stay far away from rather than rushing up with “Basic Attacks” which might be more powerful. Or choosing exactly which heals or buffs to use, etc. So later into the game, I think most people will give up the “auto-attack” button in favor of using the commands themselves.

* Another mote of strategy: Your ATB bar fills up (with 3, 4, 5, or 6 attacks depending on how powerful you are), then you do that chain of attacks. If you hit Triangle, it breaks your chain early and you just unleash whatever small amount you built up. Knowing this is useful, because often you have to break out of a chain of attacks in order to quickly revise your strategy. That little element was an interesting note.

* Characters: All the characters that I found utterly unlikable are now pretty much my favorite characters because of how they change, ‘reveal’ etc throughout the game. All except for Sazs, though (the black guy): He was my favorite in the beginning, and in the later game he’s still my favorite. The most human of all the characters, he’s basically in it all just to help get his son back. Others might do crazy magic powers and the like, but Sazs is the most human character, to which the others are scaled against. He evokes the most empathy, I think.

* Levelling: Sure enough, at around the 18 hour mark, levelling gets blown to pieces: Every character can pick up every ability in every paradigm/optima. New optima (from scratch) cost a ton to pick up, though, but it’s still an option. And here’s the thing: Unlike FFXII’s grid system where everyone can do what everyone else can, it’s more like FFX’s sphere grid: Both Sazs and Hope are “Enhancers”, but the enhancements that Sazs can do at the beginning Hope can’t do until waaaaay later, and vice-versa. At level 3 Healer Vanille can do “Raise”, but even as a level 4 Healer Lightning can’t gain that ability yet (must be a higher tier). So while everyone can learn every role, the route in which they gain their powers is totally different and unique.

* Plus, everyone has a kind of “core role”: Lightning: Attacker, Snow: Defender, Sazs: Enhancer, Vanille: Healer, Hope: Enhancer, Fang: Attacker. If you stay on that core role’s optima grid, you get access to better general abilities like additional ATB slots, additional accessory slots and the like. So while any character can eventually become anything, it still encourages you to keep to your characters’ defined strengths. That allayed my concerns that the characters didn’t seem different enough in ability. In truth, I should have simply noticed it when early on Vanille’s Jammer role was doing all sorts of debuffs, while Fang’s Jammer could only do Slow/Slowga for a long while.

* The setting is still strong. The land of Gran Pulse is as wild and untamed and scary as they’ve been evoking all this time.

* You level your weapons for additional power. The levelling system is easy and has a few quirks to getting through it quickly. I like this, because there is no “most powerful weapon” that you have to do 4-hours of mini-games to unlock, you simply pick one of about 6-8 weapons that fits your playing style (for example, I use physical attacks with Lightning the most, so I’m staying with the “Gladius”, which has the highest physical attack and lowest magical attack: Other weapons are more balanced, favor magic, or do special things like add an ATB bar, status upgrades, etc).

* The background music is awesome. The “Fifth Arc” area was a little repetitive, but the background music was awesome enough that I didn’t really care.

Recent revelations/dislikes

* I just said the above about liking that there’s no “ultimate weapon” because I normally hate the hoops you have to jump through to unlock them. Well, I kinda miss knowing that there’s an Ultimate Weapon out there, that it’s really up to me to decide which weapon I want to level up. The agony of choice.

* Sometimes the AI is dumb: OK, I said before the AI usually does what you were going to do anyway. Well, I take that back on two counts: Sometimes the other characters wander to close to the big monster, or wander too close together (which means a sweeping attack hits both characters, whereas if the character moved away on their own they wouldn’t be hit). It’s all part of the randomness of battle, I guess, and that’s OK, BUT…

–Curera (the one that casts the Low-Level spell cure on multiple friends) was the spell that made the AI stooooopid. I almost wish it was possible NOT to take that spell. Without it, your AI companion will see you (the party leader, like Lightning) in the Red for damage, member 2 in the Yellow, and herself in the Green (little damage taken). Without Curera, she will cast Cure on one character several times, taking them from Red to full health quite quickly (this is the behavior I like/want). However, once she/he learns Curera, she will take more time to cast that instead since the other member is in the Yellow. Which means that it takes longer for the party leader to get to full health. I think it’s for that reason that they made Lightning a Healer as well, so you can heal yourself up if you need to. Still, I almost wish I could force a “FFXII”-style “Gambit”, telling party members to Never Ever Ever use Curera, Ever.

* Most boss battles are challenging and fierce. That’s cool. The boss battles against the Summons are just annoying, frustrating and twitchy. That is, there is a very very very specific strategy to win the summons boss battles in the limited time you have (the leader in each battle is cursed to die in about 1-2 minutes if they don’t win), and if you deviate from that strategy slightly you’ll either suffer a total party kill (game over) or a time running out (also game over). The regular boss battles were challenging, and on one MAJOR boss battle I died about 8 times on a 10-minute battle before I succeeded, and it was challegning/interesting enough, and enough in my hands to deal with, that I didn’t mind. However, I was dreading the last few Summons battles, because I had to replay those over and over until I went online and figured out the Perfect Strategy to beat them, and even then I would misfire and get a TPK, or be on the road to success with the time ran out. On each of them I beat the Summons with seconds to spare.

In short, the “time limit” of the Summons battles should be increased to 33% higher or something. I could deal with the TPKs but the timeouts just were a kick in the nuts.

* Killing Tunnels: OK, I admit, once I got to the first “open area”, about 18-20 hours into the game, where you wander around a giant area (think Calm Lands from FFX), and then went back into the linear-style format, I too was like “Hmmmm, couldn’t they have given us at least a few more open areas earlier in the game?” It’s not enough to denounce the game as linear and pointless (all of the games in the series are guilty of that), but it does feel claustrophobic after a while. Oh, at least in the earlier parts of the game (13-16 hours in) there were often multiple routes to take to get to the same destination, so that was a little open…

* I like the story and the characters a lot. In the end, I don’t think it can “beat” FFX: Sin, and the love story between Tidus and Yuna is too strong. There’s a love story in FFXIII, but it’s between the main character(s) and a non-playable NPC who you don’t see except for a few cutscenes, so it’s just not as abjectly powerful. Still, though, the world has drawn me in and I’m excited to see what comes next, which puts it so far above 8, 9, and 12.+

* Exploration: A lot of folks online deride it because there’s no “towns to explore”. In reality towns usually equal a chance for the design team to pad the game by making you run all over the place getting items or fetching things. Still, a part of the early series has been “wandering around on a big map, filling it out and pushing the edges out”. FFXIII simply doesn’t have that sort of thing. It doesn’t mean the game sucks (it doesn’t!), just that the exploration thing is missed.

Anyway, just some thoughts so far. I’ll have to play light for a few days as I have other real-life goals to work on, but I’ll play lightly for the next few weeks and post some irregular updates.

-Andy

+ BTW, if you really want a JRPG with a good story, the best is still Shadow Hearts II: Covenant for the PS2. The most epic story, the most engaging setting and background, and very empathetic characters, even the bad guys. Best story, system, and overall game that I’ve ever played in the genre. Only downsides are lots of random battles (ala Final Fantasy) and a “ca-raaazy French gay duo” who follow you around with double-entendre. Still, it’s a phenomenal game, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone. Note: DO NOT PLAY 3/”From the New World”, it’s crap. Also, I never played the first “Shadow Hearts” (which takes place in Asia), but you don’t need to to fully understand the story of 2/Covenant.